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Comment by ashater | Hacker News Reader

My younger daughter, who is pretty good at making games in Scratch is not that interested in jumping into text/code based programming. I do think Scratch makes things a lot easier and text based programming is not thar appealing to kids. I will try to start her with Pygame but even that might make it seem very arcane and not very visual.

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PICO-8 [1] might be a good choice. I always consider that kids want their friends to try their games, and so being able to easily distribute to the web is awesome. They can link their game from the site [2], or with some parental help they could even serve them from their own website, which could be very empowering for a kid.

1. https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

2. https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?cat=7&carts_tab=1&#sub=2&mod...

Another vote for Pico-8. It’s such an incredible little package.

The simple IDE and forced constraints makes you really focus on the basics like fun gameplay loops and minimal graphics, and the fact you can do the code, graphics, sound effects, and music all in one little program is a really smart way to teach you all different aspects of game dev.

It’s also so ridiculously easy to share your creations, outputting a simple HTML/JS combo that works perfectly on mobile and desktop even if they don’t own the program.

My daughter (12) got her start in Scratch, but had a hard time jumping into Python. She's enjoyed GBStudio, and has made a number of small games in that environment, and enjoys loading them onto a flash cart to run them on an old physical Gameboy.

Maybe try something with instant feedback?

I'm not sure what precisely, but I'm picturing a split view with text on the left and the output on the right.

I do this in web dev, React + hot reload is wonderful. For games, I've done it with instantly recompiling shaders but not much else.

https://code.org/student/middle-high has an environment that's scratch-like i the UI but the code is blockified JavaScript. (If you try to transpile a Scratch project to JavaScript using normal tools, you get an unmanageable JSON monstrosity)

It hides some of the text syntax, while still being an onramp to text-based programming.

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